Rabbit's Reviews #273: Abigail Williams (Summer) (5* Foreigner)

Introduction

Summer Abby is not strong. She suffers from a mismatched kit, long cooldowns, a bad gimmick, and low overall damage—she’s pretty solidly the weakest of the new Summer Servants on-balance. As an AoE damage-dealer she’s pretty terrible, and she in fact seems to be designed as something closer to a semi-support. She’s still not good in a semi-supportive capacity, but she does have some interesting supportive value in the form of her raw damage-boosting debuffs. Her closest comparison in terms of kit consistency and functionality is probably pre-buff Osakabehime. Osakabehime, though, had the benefit at launch of having fewer strong supports to compete with, which makes Abby look a lot worse by comparison despite having arguably more useful support tools. And this is, again, a comparison to pre-buff Osakabehime—which is to say, Abby looks quite bad, especially in the current JP environment.

Servant Data

Foreigner

QQABB (Lancer)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

3

5

3

Attribute	Earth
Alignment	Lawful Evil

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

April Fool's

Max HP 14,250

HP Rank

Max ATK 11,781

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,820	Base HP	2,090
Max Atk	11,781	Max HP	14,250
Grail Atk	12,896	Grail HP	15,611

Traits

Card Hits	3	3	3	5	3
Per Hit	0.86%	0.86%	0.86%	0.86%	0.86%

	NP per Hit (%)	0.86%
NP when Attacked (%)	3%

	Star Absorption	150
Star Generation per Hit	15.0%

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Void's Dust x10 Seed of Yggdrasil
3	300,000	x10 Meteor Horseshoe x10 Warhorse's Young Horn
4	1,000,000	x10 Primordial Lanugo x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
Max	3,000,000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence x10 Heart of the Foreign God

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Evil Bone
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Void's Dust
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Fool's Chain
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Shell of Reminiscence
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Eternal Ice
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Giant's Ring
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Egg of Truth
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Glowing Star Fragment
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Rose Sleep

The Rose's Slumber B

Inflict Sleep on a single enemy (2 turns) [Sleep is removed when sleeping target is attacked].
Remove buffs from a single enemy.
Decrease DEF while Sleep is active (1 time, 2 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
DEF -	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Rose Sleep is effectively two different skills. You can use it in one of two ways, and they’re mostly mutually-exclusive. The skill introduces a sleep status, which works basically the same way as sleep works in most RPGs: it prevents the enemy from acting for the duration, and it ends if the enemy takes damage. In games that aren’t FGO, this can be super useful, as you can put an enemy to sleep and then spend a few turns healing/buffing/etc. Unfortunately, FGO doesn’t give you the option to not attack, which means the sleep will be immediately dispelled before having any impact unless you’re a) in an AoE fight and b) only targeting the non-sleeping target(s). This brings me to the skill’s first use case: you can use this on an enemy in an AoE fight to keep them out of commission for a few turns while you focus on the other target(s). At best this saves you from taking two hits each turn, and in most cases it only prevents one of the three. The only cases in which this is likely to be especially useful are in fights with two enemies, one of whom is significantly more dangerous than the other, or in cases where you want to sync up enemy NP turns (so Merlin can block multiple at once). It is… a survivability tool that exists, I suppose? You flat-out can’t do this in ST fights, though, and given that the rest of Abby’s supportive tools skew ST, the value of sleep as a defensive tool starts to look highly questionable in practice. To add insult to injury, Abby’s own NP is AoE, which means she can’t avoid breaking sleep if she wants her NP’s utility or (lack of) damage. The second use case for this skill, then, is as a damage buff. The skill provides a one-hit 50% defense debuff while the enemy’s asleep, which effectively makes this a single-hit Mana Burst on a longer-than-normal cooldown. If that sounds really bad, that’s because it is. The advantage here is that Abby can use it to push an ally’s NP damage instead. Even with this skill active Abby’s own primary-target NP damage is just okay, so this supportive use is probably the most valuable application if you want to use this offensively. The skill also clears enemy buffs, which means it can help an ST ally hit for full strength regardless of what the enemy’s up to. A 50% damage buff isn’t trivial, in fairness, but the long cooldown and short duration keep this from being an especially meaningful tool.

Stun

Mass Hysteria B+

Inflict Terror status on all enemies (3 turns).
(Chance to stun them every turn (1 turn), the debuff dispels once the enemy is stunned)
Decrease DEF for all enemies (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Stun Chance +	35%	37%	39%	41%	43%	45%	47%	49%	51%	55%
DEF -	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
CD	9	9	9	9	9	8	8	8	8	7

Mass Hysteria is Abby’s signature terror skill. It works basically the same way the original Abby’s terror skill worked: at the end of each of the enemies’ turns, the enemy has a middling chance of getting stunned. The debuff wears off if it doesn’t proc within three turns, and it also goes away when it does proc (which is to say, you can’t get multiple stuns against a single target). You have roughly a 90% chance of this proccing at some point before it wears off, but you have no control over when and you still have a one-in-ten chance of a complete whiff, which makes this… not a very good survival tool, especially considering in an AoE fight the stun is unlikely to proc on all three enemies at once, which means you’re not fully protected on any of the three turns. The defense buff is the most valuable piece of this skill in practice, as it’s Abby’s only AoE NP steroid. That said, a 20% 3-turn defense debuff on a 7-turn cooldown at max level is… kinda sad.

Start Np

Those Who Guide A

Increase own NP Gauge.
Increase own Debuff Success Rate by 30% (3 turns).
Decrease Buster Card Resist for a single enemy (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
NP +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
Buster Res -	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Guiding One is probably Abby’s best skill, and on a better Servant it would actually be pretty good. It’s a 50% battery that also buffs Abby’s debuff success rate (to make her whole kit a little more reliable) and reduces a single enemy’s Buster resistance. Unfortunately, single-target debuffs on AoE Servants are always kind of gross. As with the former two skills, this is likely to be most valuable in a supportive context. The battery can let Abby NP immediately (for the NP’s supportive value) even with a 50% starting CE, which lets her run CEs like Demonic Bodhisattva (for better short-term support) or His Rightful Place (for more passive star gen). The single-target Buster resistance debuff isn’t enough to bring Abby up to pseudo-ST damage levels even with Rose Sleep’s defense debuff factored in, which implies a primary use case supporting single-target Buster Servants.

Noble Phantasm

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
A	Anti-Unit	3

Effect	Remove defensive buffs from all enemies [Activates first]. Deal damage to all enemies.

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Buff Removal
Damage +	300%	400%	450%	475%	500%

Overcharge Effect	Decrease DEF for all enemies (3 turns).

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Def -	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%

Usage Tips

Abby does not have the tools to take advantage of her own kit, but the fact of the matter is she does have a surprisingly solid level of ally damage ampage versus a single target. As such, Abby’s most valuable use case is likely going to be as an early-fight support for single-target Buster Servants. On turn 1, Abby can use her NP with the help of her battery and also drop her defense debuff and buster resistance debuff, which leaves a single target with 40% (or more) defense down and 30% buster resistance down for a few turns. Unfortunately, Abby can’t also use Rose Sleep on turn 1 without “wasting” the defense debuff on her own NP, so she’ll probably want to stick around till turn 2, drop Rose Sleep on the target, and then plug out for Merlin (or any other better sustained support) while the primary DPS NPs. This is an awkward setup, to be sure, but in exchange Abby provides more raw damage ampage on the first few turns than would Jinako, Nightingale, Waver, etc. The ideal team setup here is Merlin/Any ST Buster DPS/Abby/Merlin (possibly with a Chen Gong in there somewhere).

Abby almost seems like a good contender for a semi-support role, pairing party support with the ability to deal damage herself, but her overall damage output is just so low she’s not really valuable beyond those initial turns of dropping her buffs. To make matters worse, her cooldowns are so long you really don’t want her sitting around and taking up space long enough to cycle her skills. And just to be clear, she also has nearly no appeal as a DPS, for more-or-less all the same reasons.

I alluded to this above, but Demonic Bodhisattva is probably Abby’s best CE, as it lets her get an NP off immediately and also pushes her defense debuff, which is the most valuable part of her NP. If you want Abby to stick around (which I wouldn’t recommend) you could run His Rightful Place instead, to make it a little easier for your primary DPS to crit.

Grail Potential

Conclusion

The only thing keeping me from calling Abby completely worthless is the fact that she can push an ally’s damage versus a single target by a lot. This is unlikely to be worth much in a post-Castoria world—and it’s not like raw one-turn damage is Buster’s issue anyway—but it’s a thing she can do. Her kit is super awkward, and her ostensible primary gimmick is likely to be nearly if not completely ineffectual in most cases. Unless you really love Abby, this is a Servant to avoid.

Rabbit's Arbitrary Ratings

Overall: 2/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: 2/10
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 7/10
Defensive Utility: 4/10
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Stairs: 10/10

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Rabbit's Reviews #273: Abigail Williams (Summer) (5* Foreigner)

QQABB (Lancer)

Quick Card

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

Buster Card

Traits

Tags

Ascension Materials

Void's Dust

Seed of Yggdrasil

Meteor Horseshoe

Warhorse's Young Horn

Primordial Lanugo

Lamp of Evil-Sealing

Shell of Reminiscence

Heart of the Foreign God

Skill Enhancement Materials

Evil Bone

Void's Dust

Fool's Chain

Shell of Reminiscence

Eternal Ice

Giant's Ring

Egg of Truth

Glowing Star Fragment

Crystallized Lore

Rose Sleep

Stun

Start Np

Dreamlands

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